The present invention relates generally to hardware used in the installation of shower stalls, and particularly to a shower door jamb, (also referred to as a latch jamb) which has the object of providing flush, sealing contact along the glass shower door when the shower door is closed. It is generally the purpose of a shower stall construction to provide a water tight enclosure which can be fabricated and installed with relative ease and economy.
When installing a shower door assembly in a bathroom, caution must be taken to compensate for out-of-plumb conditions of the supporting wall surfaces and to align the stall hardware and panels. Particularly, the door suspending hinge jamb and the latch jamb, once installed, must be properly aligned, so that the swinging edge of the shower door will properly seal against the latch jamb; otherwise water leakage will occur.
Heretofore, when installing a shower door the hinge jamb for hanging the shower door was first installed mating channel piece, such as a corner post of the stall or wall channel anchored to an adjacent wall by means of expansion plugs, when the latch jamb would be aligned to the edge of the shower door before anchoring it to an opposite channel piece. Out-of-plumb conditions in the plane of the closed shower door could be compensated for by adjustably sliding, in the plane of the door, the latch jamb within its supporting channel, or for that matter, the hinge jamb within its supporting channel. However, any out-of-plumb conditions in a plane transverse to the shower door could not so easily be corrected for: transverse plane adjustments had to be accurately determined prior to anchoring the last channel piece into place.
For example, after hanging a shower door, installing a conventional latch jamb to an adjacent wall using conventional hardware would typically include these installation instructions: the latch jamb must be paralleled with the edge of the door by moving the jamb's wall channel, with attached latch jamb, back and forth until the jamb surface of the latch jamb is as parallel with the inside of the glass as possible. The latch jamb and wall channel location is then marked on the wall by drawing a pencil line along the inside edge of the wall channel. The latch jamb is then removed from the wall channel and the wall channel aligned with the pencil mark, whereupon holes are marked, drilled, and the wall channel secured in place with expansion plugs. The latch jamb is then reset over the wall channel and adjusted, in the plane of the door only, for the best fit.
The difficulty with the above installation procedure is that the wall channel for the latch jamb has to be precisely aligned with the door before the jamb and door would properly meet; if the shower door assembly included a corner post joining a panel secured from a back wall, then any out-of-plumb condition of the back wall would likely give rise to a misalignment between the corner post (and in turn the latch jamb) and the edge of the closed shower door panel. Heretofore, no simple and final adjustment was possible in the plane transverse to the shower door to correct for this condition.
Another problem in aligning the latch jamb to the door's edge is that the shower doors, which are normally fabricated from tempered glass, often will have some warpage which creates gaps at the latch jamb. Heretofore, correcting for such warpage, short of replacing the shower door, was practically impossible, since it would require bending of the latch jamb and wall channel to conform to the warpage before installation of the supporting channel pieces.
The present invention overcomes the above-described alignment problems between latch jamb and shower door, that is transverse plane alignment, by providing a latch jamb assembly mountable to a standard wall channel or corner piece, wherein the latch jamb assembly itself is easily adjustable in the transverse plane to accommodate any out-of-plumb condition of the shower enclosure hardware or to correct for warpage in the shower door itself. It is a feature of the present invention that the latch jamb can be conformed to the edge of the shower door after the wall channels and corner posts, if any, have been installed, thereby eliminating the need and difficulty of obtaining a precise alignment of wall mounted hardware of the shower door enclosure. The adjustable latch jamb assembly of the invention is easily adjusted as a final step of the installation to obtain a flush, water tight seal at the inner face between the shower door and latch jamb.
It can therefore be seen that the primary object of the present invention is to provide a latch jamb assembly for a shower door enclosure which permits the latch jamb to be adjusted in the transverse plane relative to the closed shower door to permit the latch jamb to be conformed easily to the edge of the shower door, and to do this adjustment as a final step of the shower installation.